2007 — Angers labor unions by changing her vote on measure to restrict big-box stores in San Diego.

2008 — Finds herself in a familiar spot — as the lone dissenter — when the council approves massive Quarry Falls mixed-use development in Mission Valley.

2010 — Brokers Proposition D, measure that links a sales-tax increase to city financial reforms. It loses at polls. Forced off council by term limits.

JOHN WILKENS • U-T

Donna Frye came to be known as the "surfer chick" but that label never really fit, and not just because it's been years since the San Diego city councilwoman and almost-mayor got up on a board.

She made more waves than she ever rode.

Monday, she steps down from the council after nine years, forced out by term limits. She said she’s ready for a break from the ideological polarization, the mountain of government paperwork and the no-end-in-sight fiscal crisis that depresses everything at City Hall these days.

She means clean in the physical sense — get rid of boxes of council and election stuff — and after that, she means something else.

“Sort of whatever needs cleaning,” she said, chuckling in her familiar smoker’s rasp. “That’s really how I see it, whether it’s water quality or whether it’s politics. Kind of wherever the spirit moves me.”

The spirit that moves Frye has been a fiercely independent thing and one regularly worth watching at City Hall — comforting to those who consider her a relentless champion of the underdog and confounding to those who consider her a stubborn impediment to growth and progress.

What unites many in both camps is an agreement that she made a difference.

“We’re probably going to have to mark San Diego history B.D. and A.D. — Before Donna and After Donna,” said Steven Erie, a UCSD political science professor who is at work on a book, “Paradise Plundered,” about government here. “There’s been nobody like her.”

Erie said Frye’s passion for open government and her willingness to ask tough questions made the biggest impact. “This is a town where people like to be liked, they go along to get along, and lots gets done behind closed doors,” he said. “She was not cut of that stuff.”

Jim Madaffer, who spent eight years on the council sitting next to and occasionally clashing with Frye, said “transparency” was a buzzword when they both started, “but she made it a way of life, and I don’t think that will change. The public expects it now.”

Mayor Jerry Sanders, who got his job in 2005 by defeating Frye at the polls, and whose office has been a frequent target of her criticism, said he respects her.

“I think that the city’s better off when we have people who bring up a discussion that sometimes other people don’t want to hear and she’s been one of those people,” he said.

Ask Frye about her own legacy, though, and she balks. “I think that’s a dead person’s word,” she said. “It drives me nuts.”

Certain assumptions

Frye, 58, is by all accounts the open book she wishes City Hall was.

Over the years, she’s shared information with the public about the time she was raped in high school by a stranger, how she fled a first marriage she found abusive, how she used to be an alcoholic.

It doesn’t seem all that odd to her, as it might to others, that she doesn’t drive, or that she still lives in the Clairemont house she grew up in (with her husband, famed surfer Skip Frye, and her mother), or that she drinks ice tea as if she were being paid by the sip.

She routinely picks up odd trinkets she finds on the ground and gives them to her staff. She hand-makes colorful birthday cards decorated with glitter.

“It’s all about the magic,” she said, and by magic she means retaining the sense of wonder her parents gave her as a child by taking her to tide pools to find shells. (She didn’t learn until she was 30 that they had planted the shells for her.)

But she also knows that people see her long blonde hair and sun-weathered face, her fondness for hugs, her propensity to talk out loud about “finding my Zen” and they make certain assumptions.

“When she came into office, she was quickly marginalized and dismissed as an aberration,” said Nicole Capretz, an environmental activist who helped Frye win her first council election in 2001 and was on her staff for five years. “Oh, look, the hippie got elected.”

Frye turned that around by working hard. Instead of asking her staff to brief her on council-agenda documents — a common practice — she read them herself, carting home stacks of binders for hours of weekend preparation.

“I’m the one voting,” she reasoned, but it was more than that. Because of earlier frustrating experiences as a surf-shop owner and an activist, she didn’t trust City Hall. She read everything so she could know what questions to ask.

Within months of taking office, she lobbed her first open-government grenade, a memo wondering why the master plan for Mission Bay Park had been amended without public input.

A couple of years later, she boycotted the council’s closed-sessions to protest discussions she thought should be held in the open. She got the rules rewritten. She sponsored a successful ballot measure that improved access to city records.

Frye’s push for open government also stemmed from feeling duped by the agreement in 2002 — a year into her tenure — to increase employee pension benefits without identifying a way to pay for them.

Relying on information from city officials, she voted several times in favor of parts of the underlying plan, which spurred today’s $2.1 billion pension deficit. Later, as that financial iceberg emerged, she was the only council member to vote against granting more benefits.

"She was one of the first strong voices calling for the kind of pension reform that was needed, and is still needed," said Carl Luna, a Mesa College political science professor.

Being a burr under the saddle at City Hall — some of her colleagues accused her of grandstanding — put her on the losing end of many 8-1 council votes, at least early on. It also left her vulnerable to criticism that by failing to forge coalitions or consensus, she’s been a poor leader.

“The same thing that made her powerful hurt her at times,” said Marco Gonzalez, an environmental lawyer who has known Frye and sometimes represented her since 1997. “Often, she was the one person who refused to play games. She never abandons her real self to be a politician.”

That same independent streak meant she didn't always act the way people expected her to -- angering labor unions three years ago, for example, with a vote favoring Walmart. Earlier this year, the Democrat Frye teamed with the Republican Sanders to push Proposition D, last month's unsuccessful tax-increase and financial-reform ballot measure.

"I don't think there's anybody in town she didn't annoy," Capretz said. "To me, that just demonstrates her integrity."

No what ifs

Press Frye on how she wants to be remembered, and she says this:

“That what I originally said I would do, I did. Open government, treating people with courtesy and respect, doing my homework, being a decent person, listening to both sides of an issue, not making up my mind before I’ve heard all sides, being responsive, being accessible, being open, and being honest. Just kind of basic stuff that a human being should do anyway.”

She doesn’t spend much time wondering what might have been — if she’d become mayor, for example, which would have happened if all the ballots in her 2004 write-in campaign had been validated.

She thinks her “bankruptcy lite” plan to reorganize the city’s finances would have helped ease the staggering deficits that have led to cuts in libraries, parks and other services. “But all you can do is speculate.”

Will she run for office again, maybe mayor in 2012?

“I don’t know,” she said. “People think you need to plan stuff and I don’t do that very well. I don’t operate that way. Things will find you.”